Rio Grande hand ferry evokes lost age on U.S. border

By Ed Stoddard

LOS EBANOS, Texas (Reuters) - A trip across the Rio Grande on a hand-operated ferry is a brief one. It covers about 70 yards but it takes you back 70 years to a different era on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Able to fit three cars plus a few passengers, the hand-pulled ferry between the dusty Texas town of Los Ebanos and the Mexican town of Diaz Ordaz is the last of its kind.

Its future is uncertain as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security surveys the region to erect a fence, which the government says is needed to stem the tide of illegal immigration from the south.

The modest ferry is vital for local people who otherwise would have a 60-mile round trip to the nearest bridge crossing, in Rio Grande City, and is the last of its kind on a border where small, informal crossings are fast being closed to tighten security.

No decision has been taken to close the ferry crossing, which is the smallest of eight official ports of entry into southeast Texas from Mexico, although it provides a rare glimpse of a fast vanishing world.

"It's important otherwise you have to go around," said Nelly Cline, who works in a store near the crossing.

Local people pay $1.25 for a round trip over the river on the ferry, which is hauled by five burly men using a pulley system.

Sitting in a small kiosk, the ferry's operator, Mark Alvarez, sells tickets for the crossing, which has been in operation since 1950. It takes 50 cars or more a day, mostly Mexicans who use it to come to the United States for work or to visit family, although some tourists also use it.

"It's a fun thing to do," said Betty Slayton, a middle-aged visitor from Iowa, as she made the quick round trip under a hot midday sun.

JUST A STRETCH OF WATER

Curbing illegal immigration and securing the nearly 2,000 mile (3,200 kilometer) southwest border are hot button issues in this U.S. election year, in which Washington has pledged to complete 670 miles of new barriers in response to calls for decisive action.

There are several dozen official ports of entry along the Mexico border, from the giant 24-lane crossing linking Tijuana with San Diego, California, to a bridge the other side of the continent linking Brownsville, Texas, with Matamoros, on the Gulf coast in Mexico.

But the many smaller, informal crossings, which were once a lifeline for many isolated U.S. and Mexican communities, have steadily been severed in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, focused closer attention on homeland security.

Among the first to go was a flat-bottomed boat service at Boquillas in the sun-baked wilds of Big Bend National Park in west Texas, that reached across a shallow ribbon of water to Boquillas del Carmen in Mexico. It was closed in 2002.

A few miles upstream an aluminum rowboat that brought Mexican ranchers and their families informally to Lajitas, Texas, to buy supplies at the old adobe trading post, was shut down in a surprise raid by U.S. federal border police the same year.